Joe Auricchio

I am getting very tired of reading papers about cache coherence and memory consistency. They all go something like this:

Classic Mac OS WordPress theme (via Digg)

This was a little before my time, but it’s nice to see the old Mac hasn’t been forgotten.

There are no Apple ][ themes. Maybe I’ll make one, just for kicks.

This is only a “SHOULD” and not a “MUST” requirement because it has been proven to be impossible. [see the Halting Problem]

HTML 5 requirements for conformance checkers

Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing

An interesting alternative to scaling (stupid) or cropping (stupid) when you need to make a big image small.

DPreview article via Ted’s del.icio.us.

Repost from my main man Michael Kelly

For the past 5 or 6 years or so, I’ve been wondering what the super-cool intro music to Escape Velocity is. I’ve heard the music since in a commercial for a History Channel special on Hitler, and a commercial for Submarina. I even emailed Ambrosia once about it, but they said they’d forgotten what it was.

Tonight, on a whim, I searched for `”Escape Velocity” intro music’, and the first hit was a thread on the Ambrosia forums talking about the EV music on Good Morning America (video here). Later in the thread there’s a pointer to another thread that has links to a flash and mp3 version of the full song. They mentioned the site that has the song available for purchase, which I had found previously, but couldn’t decipher to the point that I could go buy it. (Apparently I was not alone.)

In any case, enjoy “Face of the Enemy”. I’m playing it over and over and backing it up repeatedly.

If you were a scientist or engineer working on a technology capable of launching a Singularity, or alternately destroying most life on earth, what kind of warning sign would you put on the wall behind the lab bench?

Warning Signs for Tomorrow.

Toshiba Creates Three-Layered Disc (Gizmodo via Slashdot).

Backwards-compatibility! Today’s normal DVD players will play these hybrid discs just fine, and when you put the very same disc into an HD-DVD player, you get the next-gen HD content. You pay once for both next-gen HD content and graceful degradation to ubiquitous players. It’s no longer a binary choice between DVD and HD. The very best part: so few next-gen HD players and discs have shipped yet that this tech has a fighting chance of being in the second wave of products making it out to customers.

It’s not clear yet if next-gen HD will have as sharp an adoption curve as DVDs did. DVD’s advantages over VHS were fairly overwhelming: extra features, physical convenience, vastly better video quality, multichannel audio, multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles in multiple languages. Next-gen HD doesn’t bring much, just a little bit more of everything (resolution, channels, tracks, frames). DVD has a formidable installed base without compelling reason to upgrade, so the transition to next-gen HD may be fairly slow. In a slow transition, the most backwards-compatible format will win.

Blu-Ray’s only possible hope of responding is getting players in front of TV sets and burners into the lion’s share of computers, fast. PS3 is trying on the first count, but it may not be fast enough to get out there. At least its competitors, the 360 and Revolution, don’t come with HD-DVD players. As for computers, a brief survey of the two formats’ wikipedia articles seems to indicate Blu-ray has a slight headstart, though HD-DVD has more supporters in the PC industry.

As an aside, HD-DVD uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and friends for interactive programming and menus, while Blu-Ray uses Java. To me, that says everything that needs to be said about the two formats’ technical merits and likely trajectory of adoption by programmers.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=32DA4C09BEB07855088A6F20EBB8C4DE?topicId=11211166&sid=1

Plus, amusing tie in with World of Warcraft. Hi, Cano.

On the SAT test, nigh on two years ago, I had to read and answer questions about a lovely little essay on the subject of immortality. It fascinated me, and when I got home after the test, I tracked it down. It was an op-ed piece in The New York Times, entitled “A Brief Version of Time” written by Alan Lightman in 1993.

Inspired by Jess’s latest blog entry, I dug it up again. The only clean copy I could find was in Google’s cache of an old mailing list archive that has been taken down. I <3 the internet. (There is, of course, a perfectly good copy in Nexis somewhere, and since I’m on campus I have access to it, but Nexis is scary and I don’t know how to use it. I know, I’m terrible. I should go to one of the “How to do research that doesn’t start at Google and end at Wikipedia” workshops at the Library.)

Here it is, for all the world to read again, until the Times finds me.

A Brief Version of Time, by Alan Lightman.

This just in from the “Oh SNAP” department:

Isuzu Gemini stunt driving commercials.

Not quite as crazy as C’était Un Rendezvous (local copy, ~50MB quicktime), but great nonetheless.